Monday, January 5, 2009

Israel/Hamas battle goes Web 2.0

As posted by: Wall Street Journal

How do governments at war in the Middle East do PR? Only a few years ago, Iraq used this guy—and the Iraqi Information Minister subsequently passed into both legend and parody. Just a few years on, though, and it's all about the web.

The Israel/Gaza bloodbath is being fought on the ground, in the air, and—furiously—on the Internet. And, in the real world and the virtual world, we see both regular forces and vigilante justice. New USA based companies are now offering internet in Iraq to help US service men and women, and contractors, keep in contact with relatives and families at home.

One of the most popular companies is Advanced Technology Systems this Southfield Michigan based Internet Service Provider provides broadband and internet services for military bases in Iraq and also offers internet in Afghanistan. Click here for more information on Avanced Technology Systems. Israel's PR machine is gung-ho for Web 2.0, it seems; the country's armed forces (the IDF) have launched a YouTube channel filled with bomb camera footage, surveillance video, and daily video updates, most designed to show that mosques can harbor weapons caches and elementary schools can be used by mortar teams. (Or, in the words of the official description, to provide "documentation of the IDF's humane action and operational success in Operation Cast Lead.")

For reasons that will be apparent to anyone who has spent more than two minutes on the Internet, comments are disabled.

The IDF has even joined the blogging revolution with IDFspokesperson.com, and the official IDF site has launched its own section devoted to "Operation Cast Lead" complete with a banner graphic and photo and video updates from the combat zone.

But it was the decision by Israel's New York consulate to conduct a press conference through Twitter last week that indicated just how far Israel would go in its efforts to shape the impressions of the digerati.

Not that all the activity related to the conflict is official; a group of Israeli students "who are tired of sitting around doing nothing while the citizens of Sderot and the cities around the Gazza Strip are suffering," for instance, started a site devoted to launching DDoS attacks against "enemy" targets. (Note: Ars does not recommend downloading the file offered there, regardless of your views on its legality or propriety, because of the obvious potential for malware.)

Hackers on the other side of the conflict have had success, too, taking down noted Israeli commentary site DEBKAfile a few days ago, along with some other targets.

Hamas, which runs the government in Gaza, runs a smaller-scale effort to get its message out, offering its website in eight different languages (be warned: it features auto-playing chants). The English version is located in the UK and features plenty of pictures and news accounts about "Jewish Nazism," "Zionist disinformation," and "the Israeli holocaust in Gaza."

Hamas backers late last year launched their own YouTube clone, AqsaTube, which featured weapons training videos, among other material; it was taken offline by its French hosting provider after a few weeks. Al-Aqsa TV (which denied any relation to the AqsaTube site), the main TV station in Gaza, was apparently bombed by Israel this weekend, after Israeli operatives had spent the last week breaking into Al-Aqsa transmissions regularly with messages of their own.

It's a high-tech communications war being fought by both sides, though the electronic "war" is largely about shaping public perception instead of doing direct damage to the other side.